Wednesday, 28 October 2015

The Australopithecus sediba is another important reconstruction done for the open source exhibition "Facce. I molti volti della storia umana" [1]. In getting access to the cast and in producing the 3D model of the skull, to start the to work of the facial restitution, we have been supported by Prof. Telmo Pievani, who put us in connection with the exposition "Homo sapiens" (and with its scientific material). Once the digital model of the cranium has been produced with photographic (SfM/MVSR [2]) techniques, +Cícero Moraes could proceed with the protocol we developed about Forensic Facial Reconstruction [4] of Homini (Paleoart) with coherent anatomical deformation of a Pan troglodytes CT scan [3].

In order to go on with the free sharing and disclosure, under open licenses (Creative Commons Attribution International: CC-BY-4.0), of the material we produced during the preparation of the exhibition "Facce", I uploaded today the result of this FFR in Wikimedia Commons.

Sunday, 18 October 2015

"Saturday, October 24 returns the main Italian event dedicated to GNU/Linux, free software, open culture and sharing: dozens of events all over Italy, hundreds of volunteers and thousands of visitors will be involved to celebrate digital freedom!"

This incipit comes from the official website of the event and summarizes what the Linux Day has been until now. As this year there will be also an event regarding ArcheOS (presented by +Leonardo Zampi in the city of Florence, at the organization Libera Informatica), I took the occasion to write a post with some links regarding the archaeological GNU/Linux distro, so that this material will be available for anyone who would like to show also this particular branch of the FLOSS universe.

Friday, 16 October 2015

One of ATOR's purposes is to serve as some kind of reminder for all the tricks and actions we find out during our hacking sessions.

Today I'm preparing a presentation with impress.js.

After my last lecture a listener told me that the transition speed between the single slides of my presentation was to fast.
I was moving across aerial photos, zooming in and out on points of interest.

Look for your impress.js file, open it with an editor and look for the tag "transitionDuration".
You will find it among the defauld config values, it's expressed in milliseconds. 6000 means 6 seconds of transition time.

Consider that this option defines an equal transition time for the whole presentation.
It's also possible to set different speed for every single slide transition.

The particular feature that characterized the facial reconstructions of the specimens of H. gerogicus is that each skull has some peculiarities that make it unique compared to the other subjects of the same species so far recognized. Moreover these differences are due both to sex, both to age and both to individual physiognomy. Indeed the five skulls of Dmanisi represent a wide range of variables, with at least a female specimen, two males with different individual characteristics (one with a pronounced undershot), an old subject and a young one (unfortunately impossible to reconstruct due to the missing facial part of the cranium).

The forensic reconstruction, performed with the anatomical deformation methodology [3], amplifies these differences, giving a face to our ancestors and simplifying at the same time the perception of the peculiarities which characterize the four specimens, at least for those people who are not familiar with anthropology and osteometry (like most of the visitors of the exposition).

According to the main purpose of the open source exhibition (sharing as open data all the material we produced), today I am uploading the result of these reconstructions on Wikimedia Commons with a CC-BY license. Here below you can see the four images developed, like always, with a team work. This time the equipe was composed by Nicola Carrara (Anthropological Museum of the University of Padua) and Luca Bezzi (Arc-Team), for the 3D scan with SfM and MVSR techniques [4]; Cícero Moraes (Arc-Team), for the facial reconstruction with Blender; Telmo Pievani for the final validation (University of Padua, Biology Department).